I tend to think that product launches are delayed more often than not. Because of that, the expected delays should already be part of your planning. Also, there are a few workarounds you can use to deal with unexpected delays.
I will go through both below.
1. Planning (or Before the delay happened)
Improving planning
Most organizations push product managers to promise deadlines that are not realistic.
Therefore, there is a lot of value on improving PM’s planning to properly estimate how long a new project is going to take. Ideally, PMMs and PMs should estimate how long past projects took based on complexity and compare it to the original estimations.
Also, it is common for junior teams to forget to buffer for testing, betas and unexpected bugs. Therefore, asking them to do it could improve your planning process.
Adding a buffer for the launch
Based on your previous launches, you can estimate the average delay. From my personal experience, it usually ranges from 2 to 4 weeks. Therefore, plan to launch 2-4 weeks after the date Product gives you.
Creating a plan B
It is harder to deal with a product delay if you do not have a plan B: you have to negotiate with every team (marketing, sales, and customer success) to rethink your launch dates, training sessions, etc. It’s a mess.
Therefore, plan ahead and incorporate a plan B.
- What should you do if the product launch is delayed?
- Which teams are going to be involved?
- Do I need to change the internal training sessions or only the external launch events?
- Can we previously agree on how to deal with a delay with Marketing (e.g., if we need to delay by 2 weeks, which campaigns can we anticipate?) What about other teams?
Adding more touchpoints with the Product team
Another source of improvement for some teams (especially if PMMs and PMs are learning to collaborate) is to discuss deadlines adjustment on your weekly meetings.
If you create a space on the agenda for this discussion at every meeting, PM will feel more comfortable sharing expected delays earlier and you will have more time to replan.
2. Workarounds (or After the delay happened)
However, planning sometimes is not enough and the product will be delayed anyway. There are a few tactics you could use to work around the situation.
Announcing before the launch
The easiest one is to maintain the same announcement day, but launch the features at a later date.
Not much to add here. The pro is that you do not need to change your launch plans, but the con is that your campaign will generate buzz before users can actually try the new features.
To minimize this issue, you should create a CTA that enables you to identify users/leads that were interested in the feature to follow up with them again (through marketing, sales or customer success).
Launching whatever is finished
If your team was not able to finish all the features, you can still launch whatever is ready.
The upside is launching and enabling users to try new features as soon as possible (which could improve satisfaction, churn, etc). Also, your sales team might be needing those additional features to increase conversion rates.
The downside is that the launch story might be weakened if you do not launch everything. Also, it could be difficult to lanch the missing features in the next cycle.
Mixing with another launch
Another alternative is to postpone it and launch on the next cycle (bundling with other features).
The pro is that you do not have to make changes to your overall launching plan.
However, it could become messy if you have launch themes (e.g., security features for month A, new reports for month B), as the launch would become too large and the message wouldn’t make sense.